I went down to Call of Duty: Black Ops II developer Treyarch's studio in Santa Monica to take a gander at the latest entry in the massively popular, multi-billion-dollar shooter franchise. (A franchise which has historically featured about as many female characters as you'd find in your average men's room.)

The demo the press was shown involved a protracted, exuberant bit of megadestruction in the city of Los Angeles. As our controller-wielding demonstrator shot and grenaded his way through the city, he was regularly rescued by a female pilot named Anderson who flew a high-tech VTOL aircraft. Sure, she got injured at one point and the player-character had to take control of her plane. But so what? That didn't make her any less female.

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Then again, plenty of military shooters, from Modern Warfare to Battlefield 3, have featured female pilots. But how about a female Head of State?

"We have to escort the President to safety!" shouted a soldier early in the demo. And with that, the gruff, burly dudes started escorting... a woman in a pantsuit through the warzone. Wait: you mean the President in this game is a woman too? Yup.

After that, the developers showed us a demo of their facial-capture tech. In addition to showing a motion-captured male actor portraying a soldier in the game, they showed us… yet another woman, speaking lines and emoting and everything. She started fighting back tears at one point. "Look at me. I said I wasn't going to do this," she said.

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Women everywhere! You'd almost think this wasn't a bro-tastic military shooter. (Almost.)

Women everywhere! You'd almost think this wasn't a bro-tastic military shooter. (Almost.)

I asked Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia about the game's infusion of double-X-chromosomes. "There's a female character role in the game," he confirmed. "Not just the President and the fighter pilot; as we're working on characters and stories, it's something that we wanted to do. You saw the [motion capture] demo, and while that's not [her], there is a female character role in the game. We wanted to explore that part of storytelling. "

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What part of storytelling is that you may ask? Why, the female part, of course. It's a whole other part. Of storytelling.

Call of Duty is known more for its popular multiplayer than its single-player stories. So, what about finally having playable female characters in multiplayer, a feature that the series has never included?

"We haven't talked about create-a-class in multiplayer yet."

Hmm. Results are inconclusive.

The first Black Ops bravely blazed a new path for women in games by casting Emmanuelle Chriqui as "The Numbers Lady." Specifically, they cast her lips and cigarette-holding hand, as she played a mostly faceless woman who read numbers into a microphone for about twenty seconds during the opening cinematic. This role earned her a Spike Video Game Award nomination in 2010.

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It sure looks like Black Ops II is going to up the ante by including multiple female characters, giving them faces and names, and having them speak non-numerical dialogue.